Screen clutter clear-up

If the screen on your PC, smartphone or PDA is crammed with icons, the Xerox Corporation in Stamford, Connecticut, can reduce the clutter. It has patented software that scans the text relating to the icon, distils what it thinks is the salient point, and translates it into text messaging language to shorten the words (US 2003/0159107).

So a long filename is converted into a pithy phrase displayed in bold type. For example, the title of Xerox's patent "Methods and systems for incrementally changing text representation" becomes "Txt Xtractn". To remind the user of the original title, the software can play an animation showing how it has contracted the file name.

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